I hurried through Friday trying as hard as I could to avoid more vampire stuff to process. I stuck to my human friends, finding someone to walk with between each class and sitting with them at lunch. During lunch I made homework buddy plans with Angela that involved me driving her to my house immediately after school. (Angela lived near enough to walk between school and home, and wouldn't leave a car behind that she'd have to fetch later.) When I met up with her right after gym, it successfully deterred Edward from catching up with me (I caught a glimpse of him in the parking lot, and his expression said that he certainly would have).
Angela hopped into my truck and we rumbled down the highway and to my house. I fixed us celery sticks and plopped some dip into a bowl, and then it was several hours solid of homework. At least ostensibly. Angela subscribed to the "work next to each other" theory of group studying, and didn't look over my shoulder. I finished everything that was due on Monday so it wouldn't hang over my head on the weekend. But after that, I pulled out my personal, non-school notebook, and thought in plain sight.
I had reasonably strong evidence that vampires "mated for life", so to speak. I didn't know if they ever engaged in casual friends-with-benefits arrangements, but from what Edward had said, if they actually went so far to fall in love, there they stayed. Alice had said only that Edward "liked" me. But she had a strong motive to avoid spooking me and sending me out of Forks on the next plane. She'd asked me to promise not to stop speaking to her brother, and she'd approached me before I'd made any mental threats to go to Charlie about the family - she'd approached me at the first available opportunity after I'd decided to treat Edward's staring as a harrassment issue. (Well, she had also saved me from Tyler's van, but that was the sort of thing that would have likely turned up in any future-peeking she did about me.)
I wasn't sure if this particular aspect of vampirism "worked" with humans like me. But... If I would be easy for Edward to forget about, if I were just an arbitrary human who caught his fancy, there was no reason for the vampires to have any collective interest in me at all. There would be no reason for Edward to follow Alice's guidelines about what would set me off. There would be no reason for him to put himself through the ordeal of being around my super-yummy self. There would be no reason for his family to trouble themselves to welcome me. There would be no reason for Alice to see me eventually becoming a vampire. He would have every motivation in the world to go chew on elephants in Kenya or otherwise be not-here until I graduated and went off to college.
If Alice saw me as her future sister-in-law, though... eternally and vampirically bound to Edward...
Yes, then I could see Edward's family rallying around him, glad that the odd one out of their number had at last found his eternal bride - just add venom. I could see them graciously agreeing to satisfy my curiosities - which would have been dismissible at best and a death sentence at worst for anyone else. I could see Alice focusing on me, thinking of what I would do if Edward pursued me any of a hundred ways, coaching him...
I uttered a quiet curse. Angela looked up and I thwacked my trig book in plausible annoyance. She politely told me that her father was a minister and she'd be much obliged if I didn't swear at triangles around her, then looked back at her English essay.
I was suddenly reminded of something I'd written - at least a year and a half ago, I thought. That meant it would be in my computer, not in my notebook. I got up and fetched it; Angela wasn't curious, and I supposed she expected I'd be typing up my essay.
I tried a few too-generic keywords, searching through my logs and turning up a lot of redundancy. Finally I typed the phrase "romance novel", and my word processor took me directly to the correct section. A little under two years previously, I'd been the beneficiary of my great-aunt's sudden conversion to Catholicism and her disposal of her "sinful" book collection. She'd actually given the volumes to Renée, but Renée left them lying about, and I'd been bored one afternoon.
At a first glance, it was bewildering that women read the things. The formula, at least of the type my great-aunt had preferred, was not one that my fifteen-year-old self had found appealing. My first writings about the novels complained that they all put their heroines in helpless situations - often, they were chased by some relentless hero who could not, if it came down to it, be deterred. My great-aunt had liked fantasy romances in particular, and it was not at all uncommon for the male leads to be various types of supernatural creature with unusual mating habits such that they were committed to attaining the heroine from the moment they spotted her.
My original notes about this trend were scoffing, contemptuous. I'd thought the women in those books were all idiotic ninnies for "giving in". I thought the authors were backwards and sexist for writing situations like that.
My next relevant entry was about a month and a half afterwards. I'd happened to acquire the soundtrack to "The Beauty and the Beast" (I had a soft spot for the story due to name similarities), and noticed that there was a similar pattern. Belle was, of course, trapped in the Beast's castle. If she annoyed him, he certainly had the capacity to do her immense harm, and he frightened her with this power.
What he couldn't do was exercise this option one iota more than she cared to forgive, without sabotaging himself.
Beauty and the Beast was an unusual story of the pattern in that there was an explicit result the Beast wanted and had to earn by getting Belle to love him. The romance novels tended to leave that embedded in a way that was too subtle for me to get at first. In the fairy tale (as retold by Disney with singing tea services, of course), love was the prerequisite for the Beast to be debeastified. In the novels, love was the goal itself.
What Belle and the other heroines had was absolute power over whether their romantic interests got to win the prizes they were after.
The only way the Beast could get what he wanted - and it wasn't even a sure thing - was to throw himself into becoming who Belle wanted and doing what Belle wanted. He needed her; she was merely under his power. If there had been no time limit, if he could have kept her stuck in his castle forever, all the roaring and destruction he could bring to bear wouldn't become any more effective. He couldn't win by coercing her into saying certain words or performing certain acts; he had to win by making her feel a certain way.
As a romance trope, where the entire point of the book was for the couple depicted on the cover art to be together in the end, this pattern was subject to a certain condition. Specifically, there could not be any non-personal reason for the heroine to reject her suitor. His personality was malleable - she could ask for whatever she liked, holding all the cards as she did - but if he happened to be poor or ugly or otherwise objectionable in some less readily addressable way, the book would a) make a worse wish-fulfillment story for the target audience, and b) feel implausible.
It was a very strange feeling, to have landed in a romance novel.
Because unless I was very much mistaken, I had acquired for myself a vampire who had one chance at love, inexplicably me; who knew that he could only get what he wanted if I was happy; and who was most definitely not poor, ugly, or otherwise objectionable.
Angela completed her essay, and asked to be driven home. I closed my laptop and managed to get her to her house without driving us into any trees, despite my mind's insistence on continuing to reel. I thought I knew the situation; I just didn't know what I wanted out of it, and that was a very uncomfortable thing to not know.
I drove home alone, frowning at the road.
Charlie had returned from work by the time I pulled into the driveway. I blew into the house, put a pot of water on the boil, and made spaghetti; I didn't have the energy for anything complicated. There were meatballs in the freezer and jars of sauce in the pantry. I threw everything together once the pasta had cooked, brought Charlie his plate in the family room, and ate mine at the kitchen table.
Exactly one minute after I'd finished my helping of food, the doorbell rang.
"I got it," I called to Charlie, and I went to answer the door, expecting one or another of the vampires. I was right. It was Alice.
"Your future went all dizzy," she said, accusation in her voice. She spoke softly enough that there was no way for Charlie to hear her over the television. "I have an awful headache. Can I come in?"
"Fine," I said, standing aside. They weren't going to let me think alone very much, were they? I supposed that was why Alice saw me going "dizzy". My only plans right now were to make up my mind. But that was exactly what muddied her visions.
I showed Alice up to my room, and sat on my bed. She took my desk chair, spun it around to face me, and planted her elbows on her knees. "Edward's going out of his mind," Alice said baldly.
"You know," I said, "until yesterday I didn't think he knew you'd told me that he "liked" me."
Alice winced. "He didn't, until yesterday. I'm usually fairly good at avoiding thoughts I don't want him to catch. I slipped up."
"I do need time to think things through, and make decisions," I complained. "I don't like to issue snap judgments about anything important. I have to figure out what I want, and make sure that I approve of the reasons I have for wanting it, and pick the best way available to get it, and I prefer to do this in writing, but I don't like to write too much with anybody around, and so I have to wait until I'm alone or near somebody who thinks I'm taking some other kind of notes and won't look. I was going to block out all Saturday to do it. You couldn't wait?"
"Edward couldn't wait. He begged me to talk to you," said Alice. "Begged. Bella, I think he would have given you lots of time, all the time you wanted, he probably would have told us all to stay away from you and give you plenty of space, but - oh, you should have seen him the day you switched lab partners!" she exclaimed. "He was practically in a panic. He thought he could take off for a week and you'd be right where he left you, waiting for him to sort his thoughts out. But you didn't. He went back to school and found out that you were trying to get away from him and couldn't stand it - you're smart, I know you've figured this all out, I saw you writing it." She waved a hand.
With a sharp shock, I realized that Alice's power wasn't necessarily more ethically innocuous than Jasper's or Edward's. "Alice," I started hotly.
She shook her head, causing her short black hair to fly around. "No. Sorry to interrupt, but no. Later. Later, we will have that conversation. Promise. Right now, we will talk about Edward. You figured it out, you're very smart, be proud of yourself, please don't run away someplace inaccessible just because the situation is horribly awkward."
"Am I allowed to say anything, or are you just here to plead for Edward's sanity?" I asked, perturbed.
"I just want to stick to the topic. You can talk," Alice huffed.
"What do you - or Edward, or anybody - expect me to do?" I inquired, spreading my hands helplessly. "Does he really think it's going to speed things up to not give me Saturday to get my head straight?"
"No. I don't think he even knows what he wants to happen here. He thinks I'm going to pick magic words that will magically make you magically decide that you're magically in love with him. Jasper was on edge all through lunch today, picking up Edward's mood when you didn't sit with us, it was awful." Alice shook her head disgustedly. "I told him, I told him, that he needed to go slow."
I took a very deep breath. "What's it like?" I asked. My voice came out soft and earnest where I'd been expecting exasperation - that was interesting.
"I don't think I'm typical there," Alice frowned. "I'd been a vampire for almost twenty-eight years when I started seeing Jasper in my visions. I knew just what to expect. I waited for him in a diner, and he showed up, and I walked right up to him and said "You've been keeping me waiting a long time," and he ducked his head like a good Southern gentleman and said, "I'm sorry, ma'am." And then I held out my hand and he took it and we were... whole. Emmett has a better story," she said. "I think he'd prefer to tell it himself, though."
"I'm right, then," I said, "that it doesn't matter if I'm a human or a vampire, it works the same way?"
"It works the same on Edward," Alice said. "You're still human in every way." She paused. "You know, if you get turned, it will work on you. It'd be very convenient," she pleaded.
"If I get turned? I thought you were sure about that?"
"You were about to figure out the part where as soon as you turn, the falling in love part symmetrical," grumbled Alice. "That'd unmake your mind right there until you figured out Edward, and that could go any which way as far as I can see."
"But when I'm turned, I had the impression that there was an adjustment period. I probably shouldn't do it on a school night, for example," I said wryly. "I was thinking maybe summer - I could tell Charlie I'm going to tour Europe or something while I work on conquering my baser impulses."
"Well, the adjustment period is usually longer than that," said Alice. "Although, when I did see you crystal-clear as a vampire, you had newborn colored eyes and there were a couple of images of you being around humans. Carlisle thinks you might adjust better because you're expecting to be turned, can go in a little prepared, and none of us were. So a summer might work for you - but you might need a backup story about having suddenly been accepted to early college somewhere."
"But upon being turned, I'll be just as smitten with Edward as he is with me?" I asked.
"Right," said Alice. "I mean, if not before - but yes, at least by then."
I drew my knees up to my chest and rested my chin on them. "I don't know what to think about that."
"I know," grumbled Alice. "It's making my head hurt to keep looking at it."
"I'm sorry," I mumbled. I liked Alice, and didn't want to give her headaches, but I didn't see how I could think any faster.
"I saw you and Edward together after you turned," cooed Alice coaxingly. "You looked so happy. I saw Jasper following you around all the time, just to soak it up, he likes to be around happy people."
I turned my face down, hiding it against my jeans. "I barely know Edward," I whispered.
"He's not going to push you to get turned," Alice said, surprising me. "He still thinks you'd be better off as a human. Lack of fated togetherness and all. He just wants... he wants you around. You know, I think he might even settle for it if you just wanted to be his friend - as long as he got to spend time with you. He can't tolerate being away from you for long before he starts getting very annoying. He paces." She wrinkled her nose. "I mean... given that he thinks you should stay human and that you are very, very fragile, his best-case scenario probably looks like being just friends from a spectator's perspective anyway."
Right. Man of steel, woman of Kleenex.
"You still don't see me dead?" I checked. "I mean, not of unnatural causes?"
"Still don't see you dead," Alice confirmed. "With a heartbeat or without, you're walking around as far as I can see."
I considered this. It was not that much to ask. I didn't have any spite for Edward, let alone enough to drive him up the wall when the remedy was easily enough at hand. "I will," I said, "be Edward's friend, for the time being. And I will think."
Alice nodded. "I'll let him know." And she got up and glided out of my room to let herself out.